When a user performs a search for documents within a database, a search engine may analyze and/or filter the documents within the database to provide the most relevant results. Some documents returned to the user may be part of a family of related documents, such as a file embedded within another file or an email with corresponding email attachments. For example, in an e-discovery platform, users may search a document database for documents related to a specific search query. In response, the e-discovery platform may return specific documents that are related to the search query according to a similarity calculation, as discussed further below.
Traditional methods for providing the results of a document search to a user may include calculating and displaying numerical scores that quantify the relevance of particular documents to the user's search. For example, a search engine may calculate relevance scores that quantify the relevance of individual documents. The search engine may then report the individual relevance scores along with the corresponding documents from the document database. Nevertheless, in cases where the search results contain members of document families, conventional systems for displaying relevance scores may not provide users with a comprehensive assessment of the relevance of all documents and document families within the search results. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies a need for improved methods for displaying search results.